Readers’ wildlife photographs

Reader Carl Sufit sent us some underwater shots of cephalopods; his notes are indented:

I’ll start with some images from Bonaire, of my (and many others’) favorite Order(?), Octopoda(?)

Although they are generally nocturnal hunters, we do get to see them during the day, although they tend to retreat back into a tiny hole in the reef when confronted by divers. Occasionally I’ve seen one that seemed so intent on some task that it ignores the bubbling hulks nearby. This one, I assume a Caribbean Reef Octopus, Octopus briareus, kept leaving its lair in a coral head, and moving a meter or two down to a sandy area and grabbing some dead coral and bringing it back up. Setting up defenses?? No idea.

And I’ll throw in a cousin cephalopod, a Caribbean Reef Squid, Sepioteuthis sepioidea. They often shy away from divers, but occasionally they seem curious and I’ve actually been approached by them briefly.

And some mammals from Karen Bartelt:

I recently took a trip to Panama with the Sierra Club. One of the places we stayed was called to Canopy Tower, a former radar installation in the old Canal Zone. Now part of Soberania National Park, it’s an ecolodge and an excellent place to view wildlife. Though the focus of the trip was birds and butterflies, we did see a few mammals, including this Brown-throated Three-toed Sloth (Bradypus variegatus). The second pair of photos were taken days after the first two, so these may be two different animals. There were several sloths around, and it was wonderful to shoot across the canopy rather than up, as we were at about the same level. They seemed to not have a care in the world.

Canopy Tower:

There were also troops of Geoffroy’s Tamarin (Sanguinus geoffroyi) that came and begged for bananas. We heard howler monkeys, and also saw agoutis and capuchin monkeys, but my photos of these aren’t very good.

Finally, we have last night’s moon, photographed by reader Nicole Reggia with a hand-held camera propped against a tree, and a 150-600 mm Tamron zoom lens:

I wondered if the octopus was creating a hide to aid its hunting? They’re so smart, and I love videos of them carrying one or even two coconut shell halves to hide in from predators in areas where they don’t have a cave nearby.

I have heard that octopi sometimes do this for protection. Suspecting it is a female (it looked ‘big’), so maybe it was preparing a protected nursery to place her eggs? She would be pretty single-minded in something like that, I guess.

So.. is it octopi or octopuses? While we are at it, is it
‘carah-bee-ann’, or ‘carib-bee-en’?

I got kind of excited seeing the picture of a new world primate. See the nostrils? Notice how they open sideways? That is a new world primate character. Old world primates have nostrils that open downward, and so our nostrils are consistent with the hemisphere of our origin.

When photographing the Moon it’s worth going to manual exposure mode, if you can. There are online guides on setting the camera for different Moon phases. Otherwise you’re likely to get overexposure, as here.